Analysis Of The Immigrant: A Dialogue Between Marlen Nourbese Miranda
Language, Memory and Identity in the Discourse of the
Immigrant: A Dialogue Between Marlene Nourbese Philip and Ana Miranda
Daniela Cordeiro Soares Silva
Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil
Diaspora women are caught between patriarchies, ambiguous past, and future.
They connect and disconnect, forget and remember, in complex, strategic ways.
James Clifford
Marlene Nourbese Philip and Ana Miranda are two contemporary authors writing from two different contexts. Philip, an immigrant from Tobago, one of the old British colonies in the Caribbean Islands, writes in Canada and has become part of the great and diverse corpus we call Canadian Literature. As a postcolonial immigrant, her work is included in what we define as the narratives of the new diasporas. Ana Miranda, in her turn, is Brazilian and writes in Brazil, which means she does not write as an immigrant or as a subject of diaspora like Philip, but her novel Amrik1 definitely reflects upon the immigrant experience. Yet, my choice to work with these two writers is not limited to the fact that …show more content…
The story is told by a third person narrator, who recollects an immigrant woman’s memories of her mother and home. This woman, who instead of carrying a name appears as “she” in the story, tries to understand her past and her experience as an immigrant as she bakes the black cake her mother used to prepare and send her every year. In this case, the longing for the black cake symbolizes not only the memory of her mother but also a desire for motherland as she connects the cake with a past of exile for the African people. As the protagonist puts together different ingredients in the cake, we learn that she has a double history of migration which she tries to recollect and connect: she is an immigrant in the sense that she has 3 Marlene Nourbese Philip, “Burn Sugar”, en Stories by Canadian Women, Oxford UP, Toronto, 1984, pp.
Immigrant: A Dialogue Between Marlene Nourbese Philip and Ana Miranda
Daniela Cordeiro Soares Silva
Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil
Diaspora women are caught between patriarchies, ambiguous past, and future.
They connect and disconnect, forget and remember, in complex, strategic ways.
James Clifford
Marlene Nourbese Philip and Ana Miranda are two contemporary authors writing from two different contexts. Philip, an immigrant from Tobago, one of the old British colonies in the Caribbean Islands, writes in Canada and has become part of the great and diverse corpus we call Canadian Literature. As a postcolonial immigrant, her work is included in what we define as the narratives of the new diasporas. Ana Miranda, in her turn, is Brazilian and writes in Brazil, which means she does not write as an immigrant or as a subject of diaspora like Philip, but her novel Amrik1 definitely reflects upon the immigrant experience. Yet, my choice to work with these two writers is not limited to the fact that …show more content…
The story is told by a third person narrator, who recollects an immigrant woman’s memories of her mother and home. This woman, who instead of carrying a name appears as “she” in the story, tries to understand her past and her experience as an immigrant as she bakes the black cake her mother used to prepare and send her every year. In this case, the longing for the black cake symbolizes not only the memory of her mother but also a desire for motherland as she connects the cake with a past of exile for the African people. As the protagonist puts together different ingredients in the cake, we learn that she has a double history of migration which she tries to recollect and connect: she is an immigrant in the sense that she has 3 Marlene Nourbese Philip, “Burn Sugar”, en Stories by Canadian Women, Oxford UP, Toronto, 1984, pp.